In many ways, your email list is your greatest asset. Email is consistently ranked number one among marketing activities with a whopping 2,900% ROI. Whether you're a B2C business sending transactional emails or a B2B business guiding leads and prospects through the buyer's journey with nurturing campaigns, email is where the rubber meets the road. But running a successful email marketing campaign takes planning and knowledge of how to maximize your engagement.

Here are a few tips to guide you:

Have a specific goal in mind.

Understanding why you're sending a marketing email will help you target recipients, write content that resonates with them, and choose appropriate calls-to-action (CTAs) with trackable results. Whether it's brand awareness, lead generation, website traffic, webinar registrations, or survey participation, having desired end results in mind will help you pull the pieces together for a successful email and keep your audience more engaged.

Your subject line has the greatest effect on engagement.

The subject line is the single most important variable affecting your open rate and total engagement rate. Start by thinking of your subject line as an enticing promise of value so your recipient will be more likely to open it and receive the value you deliver. It should be short and to the point with a length of 35 to 45 characters, including spaces. A Marketo study revealed that subject lines with seven words and a character count between 41 and 45 produced the highest total engagement, including opens and clicks.

Don't forget personalization.

Another great practice is to include personalization when you can, both in the subject line and in the body of the email. Consumers have come to expect personalized experiences in both their digital and print content, and studies show that personalization in subject lines leads to a 26% higher open rate. What's more, personalization in transactional emails lead to 5.7 times more revenue. At the very least, start asking for first names in addition to emails in your online forms. Personalization is quite easy these days; you'll find that most email marketing software programs offer user-friendly features to assist you.

Match your content to your audience.

Your lists should be segregated by the demographic and psychographic variables of your contacts, as well as where said contacts fall in the buyer’s journey (i.e., prospect or customers). This task seems like a no brainer, but many companies have not accomplished it yet. Email marketing platforms give you the ability to create many lists, representing different target audiences that are applicable to your business. Though list maintenance is a challenging, laborious task, the benefits of matching content to the right audience will be apparent when your stats show how engaged your audience is. One way to make segregating easier is to start with forms that dump contacts into buckets based on the content they're viewing, and questions you ask like job title, location, and industry.

Most experts agree that email marketing will continue to be an extremely effective tactic for the foreseeable future. So, it is a great benefit to your company to keep your lists clean and growing, and to actively work toward improving your email engagement rates. No matter the industry you’re in, email marketing is a valuable tool. Please feel free to contact us if you have any questions or if you’re looking for assistance with your email campaigns.